iPhone Apps by Microsoft

It shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone that Microsoft has a couple of free apps in the iPhone App Store. The apps are based on Microsoft’s own technologies, Microsoft Tag and Seadragon. While Microsoft Tag is only useful if you’ve got their tags to scan, Seadragon Mobile really stands out. You can views thousands of photos seamlessly just as you can on your PC. If you know what Photosynths are, you know what I’m talking about. Since we’re on it, let’s take a look first at what Seadragon has to offer. Keep in mind that this app is just a technical preview by Live Labs who also created Deep Zoom and Photosynth

Here’s the feature list of Seadragon Mobile from the App Store:

• View thousands of images over the air
• Quickly view massive gigapixel images
• Explore Photosynth collections in 2D, including your own
• Add your own PhotoZoom/ Deep Zoom Composer content
• Subscribe to Deep Zoom RSS feeds

The content is divided into various categories such as Art, History, Maps, Photos, Photosynths, Space and Technology and The Web. If you’ve created your own Deep Zoom or Photosynth content you can even add that.

Navigation is very straightforward. Pinch to zoom and flick to scroll. In terms of performance, even when there are hundreds of images on the screen, I didn’t find any slow down or lag apart from the data loading over my 2mb DSL connection. It was really smooth experience on my second generation iPod Touch. Below is a Photosynth of the Grand Canyon.

Rotating the device brings up the landscape mode. Good for images that wouldn’t fit in the portrait mode like the Mars (Viking) image below.

This is the same Mar image above but zoomed in almost a hundred times or more, which brings me to a missing feature in this app. You wouldn’t know how much you have zoomed in any image. There’s no indicator for that. Neither can you upload your images from your iPhone or iPod Touch to create a Photosynth or Deep Zoom composition. Apart from that, there’s hardly anything to complain about. A must have application if you like Seadragon.